


Mapping the Sky

by Emerla



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-03
Updated: 2015-07-03
Packaged: 2018-04-07 11:16:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4261299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emerla/pseuds/Emerla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Legolas comes home, but never to stay.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mapping the Sky

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lizardbeth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lizardbeth/gifts).



It’s autumn again when Legolas returns to Mirkwood. His father brushes off the years like raindrops, but he has counted every one and stored them away. He’s not quite sure why, but it feels important to impose structure on that otherwise vast distance between them, somehow greater than the space that split wide open the moment he had cut down his father’s sword and turned away without a backward glance. Time and the miles between them had stretched that space, distorted it so he no longer knew quite what it was that kept him away. He’d turned his thoughts to home many times, even passed through the outer borders when he had found himself nearby, but there was nothing pulling him onwards, and he retraced his steps noiselessly like a ghost.

He isn’t even sure that this will be the time he keeps going, until he senses the patrol tailing him like a stranger. They vanish at some point, and the forest is his own again. The first leaves are falling, and he deliberately steps on them, breaking the quiet with sharp crunches. Like a bird, he will be gone by winter.

The second patrol doesn’t bother hiding, but it’s clear they too don’t quite know how to treat him. Is a prince in exile still their superior? And then there is a familiar voice, and Tauriel is there. There’s a moment before she recognises him in which he thinks, _she’s exactly the same_.

He’s wrong, of course. Her feelings blow across her face as openly as ever, but now Ravenhill stands between their past and present, snow and blood and the dwarf lying dead at her feet. She smiles at him eventually, but not without reservation. Another relationship he has to repair, but he has a harder one to fix first.

If Tauriel had challenged his belief that home was the constant against which to measure the change in himself, his father resurrects it. But Tauriel has ever been restless and Thranduil unvarying, with Legolas falling somewhere in between the two, making sure they never unbalanced. ( _Is that still his role?_ he wonders.They don’t operate as a trio anymore.)

He walks into his father’s chambers and has the odd impression that the rest of the world moves at a faster pace beyond these walls. Thranduil is outside on the balcony, leaning into the late afternoon sun with a glass of wine in hand.

“What is it?” he says, hearing Legolas approach. He hasn’t opened his eyes.

He’s been away for decades and not once has he thought of what he would say upon his return, so he simply says, “I’m home.”

Thranduil has thought about this moment, but without the advantage of forewarning he is thrown off by the spontaneity. He carefully sets down his glass as he considers, casting back for a point of reference. Like Tauriel, he finds Ravenhill, as if the moment of breaking is a map to fitting the jagged edges back together.

“Did you find what you were looking for?”

His back is still turned. Legolas feels like he’s reporting back to a general, and the impersonality bothers him. Thranduil doesn’t notice.

“I am only just beginning.”

“So you will be leaving again?”

“Yes. In a few weeks, perhaps. I haven’t decided yet.”

He should have stored up all the unsaid words of the years they’d spent apart, and used it against this stilted inability to say anything that matters. Thranduil still hasn’t turned around. _Look at me_ , Legolas thinks, frustrated. _Are you scared I might vanish?_

“Come back sooner next time,” Thranduil says. It’s the closest he will get to ‘I missed you.’

Legolas is reluctant to offer a false reassurance; he has lived not knowing where he will be the next day, wandering the wild like a ship at sea, his course dependent on the whims of the tide. He doesn’t know what his father reads into his hesitation, but it’s enough for Thranduil to finally face him. He bears the scrutiny with the ease of practice, though there’s a softness he isn’t used to, as if the warm light has allayed the king’s stern composure.

“You look well. Where have you been?”

Legolas seizes the opening as if it might float away, and traces the thread of his journey from Erebor to Eriador as it tangles itself in mountains and rivers, woodlands and ruins.

It becomes a routine; though the intervals grow shorter, every time he comes home, Thranduil sets aside an afternoon. They re-orientate themselves to one other, navigating the intervening time between their last meeting so they may reach the same page again.

The penultimate time is not a goodbye, but it feels like one. The moment Legolas mentions the sea, Thranduil knows. He closes down again, his words clipped and brittle, and no talk of the fair woods of Ithilien can break his stony demeanour. He stares sightlessly at the orange leaves, as if he can turn them green again by sheer force of will.

“Ada, I’m not gone yet,” Legolas says gently. “Don’t act like I am.”

He understands what his father is doing, this regression to a state of impervious unfeeling, but he cannot agree with it. Parting is not something to be locked away and forgotten, or it will fester like a wound.

“Your heart is no longer here. You are already lost to me.”

“There is still time. I will return before I go,” he promises.

His father looks at him, bemused.

“You are speaking like a mortal.”

The years remaining to his friends are nothing to Thranduil. It will make no difference to him whether it is Aragorn on the throne of Gondor, or his great-great-grandson in a century to come; no difference if Legolas leaves for Ithilien or Valinor tomorrow. One last meeting is small consolation against an eternity apart.

“This world belongs to them now. Valinor is ours alone, and here you stay.”

“Ours?” Thranduil says sharply. “We are Moriquendi.”

“And Moriquendi roam, do we not?” Legolas says. “Your first home lies under the sea, and mine will lie beyond it, but we may still wander beneath the same stars as our ancestors before the rising of the sun.”

Tucked away under the tall trees of a realm far older than he, Thranduil hasn’t seen the restless signs of sea-longing in an age. They sit so well on Legolas it’s as if the spell of the salt waves has simply awoken something innate and immutable, an awakening that began with a red-haired captain and a cold ruin. Perhaps once he would have seethed at his own powerlessness to hold onto his son, but now all he can think of is the inevitability that they would reach this moment. All the tales of rangers and wide open skies, offered as greetings with every homecoming, were just a drawn out farewell.

He has been losing Legolas for years. He has learned how to say goodbye.


End file.
